Britain is crying out for change. Labour must now articulate what that looks like

As Keir Starmer rightly argued in The Observer, our win in Wakefield and the Tories’ historic loss in Tiverton and Honiton show the country is indeed crying out for change and now offers an ideal opportunity for Labour to begin to articulate exactly what that change might look like.

One resource the party might find helpful in developing further its direction, policy and messaging is Labour’s Covenant. A publication that was the result of bringing together academics and thinkers from across our movement to try and answer the deeper questions identified in our 2019 election review. How can we rebuild Labour’s lost coalition when old class loyalties have disappeared? What should be Labour’s economic offer? What would a vision for national reconstruction look like?

Labour’s Covenant is not intended to be communicated to the public – it’s not the language we should use. Instead, it is a political framework to help us to create a narrative around what national reconstruction actually means and why it’s needed. There are five main propositions.

Our first proposition accepts that there has been a shift in geopolitics. As Helen Thompson has argued, as the world becomes more unstable, there has been a return to geopolitics. Countries are shifting away from globalisation driven by markets and corporations and instead they are prioritising their own national security, resilience and development. Many social democracies around the world led by the left are now pursuing a programme of national reconstruction. From Joe Biden’s ‘friend-shoring’ approach to Germany’s quest for energy security, this is an important priority for most left-wing governments.

Yet, prioritising national economic development does not mean turning away from the world. Britain can still play a role in the world and use its national economic interests as a basis to build new coalitions around shared national interests. We need to remember Labour’s rich history of internationalism and align our current approach with our historic values. We could pursue an agenda to promote the cause of labour across the world in the face of global neoliberal corporations. Or in a multi-polar world, Britain has a role to play in convening other medium sized countries to take action on climate collapse.

A way for Britain to achieve this is through our second proposition: ‘The national economy.’ This is the idea that the state can proactively intervene to pursue a longer-term project of national economic development. It’s a case for active state intervention to create a fairer and more equal economy. This includes looking at industrial strategy, workers representation, skills and infrastructure. Our country is entering a key phase in history, things are changing so fast that we need a national vision for what we can achieve in this new age. How can our national interest more closely align with the interests of working people? How can the state use its many levers to better steward our economy? This might mean introducing new protections for workers, new educational institutions to tackle skill shortages and a more proactive industrial strategy.

Our third proposition argues that national reconstruction must prioritise the ‘everyday economy’ – the businesses that supply the goods and services used by people day to day. This is a vital but neglected part of our economy that employs many people and creates the economic relationships that form the social fabric of the places we live. Businesses play a relational as well as an economic role in our communities – a local cafe is not just fulfilling an economic function but also a social function.

Prioritising the everyday economy is about signalling what we value as a country, valuing what makes society worth living in. It also might change how we think about innovation. So much innovation policy takes place at the top of our economy in high tech industries with the goal of winning in a global struggle. Yet, if our wider everyday economy was the site for innovation, we might improve how thousands of smaller firms across our country operate.

Our fourth proposition is that ultimately all this must happen in a place and to produce this kind of economic reconstruction, Labour must institute new forms of governance. Places must be empowered to build up their social fabric, local institutions and economic structures. This means a new approach to statecraft that empowers citizens, so we can create much richer systems of democracy at a local level. We believe this process should be driven from below and aligned to areas that reflect local identity and belonging, rather than imposed top down units managed from Whitehall.

Using a covenantal approach we can use new relationships and ways of working together to rebuild a place. Any form of national reconstruction will involve thousands of reconstructions at a local level as part of a national mission. This is not the work of the central state alone but must also be done with others outside of it. There are hundreds of thousands, if not millions of small organisations where people work collaboratively to create the lives they want to lead – through sports clubs, dance classes, book groups, gardening or volunteering. Our politics needs to be better at recognising these broader forms of association and build an interface with these different kinds of power.

Finally, our places are nothing without the natural environment, bringing us to our final proposition: a new politics of nature. Our approach to environmentalism needs to be rooted in a deeper politics of meaning. We must value nature not just for its economic value but its intrinsic value to people. Instead of a technocratic approach to ‘net zero’, we need to unlock the deeper love people have for nature to establish a democratic consensus. Instead of climate politics becoming a culture war, it must be a bridging concept. This means understanding the history of our movement’s attachment to our ‘green and pleasant land’.

Labour was first to create the national parks, we have a rich history of fighting for working people’s access to land and nature. As one academic in our group observed: “Climate collapse has the ability to bend time and space in politics.” It creates a link between the local and the global, connecting immediate action to long term consequences vividly. Just as it may frame Labour’s future approach to internationalism, it must also be part of our national reconstruction. For example, currently corporate carbon offsetting is largely managed by companies in London who buy up huge fields in the UK to plant millions of conifer trees to offset the carbon with little understanding of how much they disrupt local ecosystems. Imagine instead if these funds were managed locally?

In Labour’s Covenant there is the beginnings of a vision for Labour. As times become more complex and unstable, we hope that this framework might help us understand how to guide our country into the future. You can read Labour’s Covenant here.